On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.
The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.
The money being wasted is yours.
3 Comments
unmagical@lemmy.ml · 0 pts · 32d
No it's not. Taxes aren't yours. When you pay someone money it becomes theirs. Also taxes are just a way to remove money from a system; there's no direct connection between money you pay into the system and those funds being used for something else. Things the government (at least the US one) funds are funded through legislative creation of funds.
stom@sh.itjust.works · -2 pts · 32d
laughs in european
Why do shitty journalists still write articles for the internet and make assumptions about the readers location?
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 32d
Don't dis Propublica, except for a few shitty headlines, they're one of few dependable news sources left in America. This is a US focused pub.